The value the self-scan systems have for the shop owners is not in automation but the fact the work is reported on customer, with of course no price reduction. That should be forbidden. I boycott those systems and wait for the human clerk to do his job, this way a little of the money made by the shop is redistributed.
Sure I can justify this. You present 10,000,000 employed people working jobs which could, conceivably, be automated. Do you seriously think that given technology currently applicable, their employers would not replace those people with machines in a heartbeat if the latter were cheaper? Sure, you can hypothesize about how that should be the case, but you would overlook a multitude of realities that indeed render the human worker superior to the automated alternatives.
I dislike human-clerk checkouts at stores. Nothing against people per se, but as a high-tech introvert I'd rather do it myself - exactly as you suggest. Sure, the technology is there; heck, Walmart even has a phone-based self-scanner so you can do 95% of checkout before you even get to the self-serve register for final payment. The technology sounds great on paper and in rhetoric, but in reality it sucks (despite my valiant concerted efforts to be a automation-supporting customer). Standard self-checkout chokes on the bottle of wine ("Human clerk, is customer over 21?" Uh, yeah, I'm greying with two kids in tow, of course I'm of age). Phone-based on-the-go checkout is time consuming (stop, turn on phone (again), tap Scan, point camera, wait for slow auto-focus, wait for crappy in-store wireless connection to function, get to payment station, get selected for another 15-minute "you've been selected for a compliance check" which confuses human staff every time). Never mind shoplifting, mis-scans, and a host of other problems. Those ten million "technology replaceable staff" are still employed because they're better at the work than technology, and relieving them of their duties does NOT make their freed-up wages available for confiscation & redistribution as "living wages" to the now-unemployed former workers (it's going to technology costs and high-tech maintenance staff). That's 10M people "contributing to maintenance of society".
As for manufacturing wants and increasing money spent vs. consumers making rational choices? I'm watching a startup put serious money into marketing staff; the product is [r]evolutionary and WILL "advance society & technology", but isn't going anywhere without convincing a lot of people to buy it, and the staff IS earning their significant wages by doing so. Oh sure, there's a lot of sales of superfluous goods out there, but even that helps fill out & support an infrastructure which gets vital goods to a broad clientele: Walmart isn't going to get five pounds of bread flour on a shelf for $1.89 without the delivery system greased with the profits from the "cheap crap" they're famous for; in comparison, that same sack of flour would cost about $5 at everything-is-perfect Whole Foods.
Indication that considering what is and isn't necessary in society could "liberate" half the population? Yeah: every society that tried it, like the Soviet Union (hint: they'd kill people for trying to leave).
At least 9 times out of 10, the self-checkout is a better experience for me. I can scan things at my own pace, pack them in my bags the way I like, and listen to my D&D podcast rather than having to interact with a stranger, unless the system acts up.
As pxl97 said, I preferred being able to scan things as I shopped and not have to stop at the checkout except to pay, but the one place around here that had that discontinued it a few months ago.
We need to push back hard against the idea that automation is "stealing" people's jobs; the promise of automation has always been that of more money for less work. We need to remind everyone of that, and reverse the trend of automation simply putting more and more money in the pockets of the already-wealthy at everyone else's expense.
-- : it doesn’t actually save any labour, just now the customer does the scanning instead of an employee.
Labor - yes, but a customer still need to be present all the time while cashier does the work. So self-checkout allows only 1 person to "waste" time
In sympathy with labor, my wife refuses to use self checkout systems. She says they're not paying her to do that job. When store managers or employees attempt to direct her to the automat, she refuses and lets them know why. They've told her she isn't the only one who prefers humans at the check out.
> The only reason it's not good is that it's not automated enough (if at all -- for me the self checkout machine is literally zero automation more than a regular cashier)
That's the point. But you are not the buyer of that automation, the store is. That automation displaced human cashiers and lowered the quality of service for customers, while generating better margins for the store (promptly eaten by competition). From your POV, i.e. customer's POV, it's not automated enough - but it's not going to be for quite a while, because there is no incentive to do it. The store doesn't stand to benefit much from additional automation, not enough to justify investment. Whether or not customers like it is irrelevant, as long as they're still coming in anyway.
The case against self checkout is simply this: it is better for humans to do complex things like customer service. Automation should be used for non customer facing jobs like restocking. I wouldn't mind shopping around a robot as much as I dislike having my shopping experience dinner by self checkout.
As another poster pointed out, self-scan checkout isn't automation, it just changes who does the work from paid employees to unpaid customers. The amount of human labor required remains similar to traditional cashier-staffed checkout.
I only go to self-checkouts if forced to use them, I rather spend my time keeping those employees on the job, plus there is hardly a time there isn't some kind of error with those machines anyway.
No price reduction as compared to what? Maybe all the prices would be 0.5% higher if all the checkout was human-only? At the end of the day, the customer is paying for most everything in the shop. (They're the one bringing the money into the system. There may be a small amount of payment for placement or other advertising, or financing via invoices, but the vast majority of money coming into the shop is coming from customers.)
I can't see a reason why self-checkouts should be forbidden. If people don't like them, don't use them. Why should people who do like them be forbidden from shopping in a way that they prefer?
I will always prefer the self-checkout option, and scan-as-you-go as long as the pickup of the scanner is easy. The queue for the self-checkout will have to be significantly larger for me to consider wasting someone else's life to scan my products. Maybe I'm jaded, but not long ago there were scandals of till workers being asked to use diapers for the holiday season.
I agree it isn't automation, but it doesn't really bother me to do it.
With the traditional arrangement, I'm standing there doing nothing while I watch the cashier. It's kind of boring and the time is lost anyway, so scanning stuff is not necessarily a worse option.
I guess my main concern is really the time it takes to get out of the store. If self-checkout has better throughput, great. I'm saving time and my ice cream is melting less. If it has worse throughput due to badly-designed machines or other customers being clueless and slow, then not great.
On a side note, I feel like a weakness for self-checkout is stuff that is more complicated than scanning. If I buy a lot of produce, I have to figure out the code for lettuce, tomato, etc., which is tedious and slow. A cashier who does this all the time has them memorized, so it's much easier for them.
I hate the self scan groceries. It takes me way more time than a fast cashier. It's just a way for extremely profitable businesses that have a semi-monopoly positions on good placement for stores to become even more profitable at expense of my ease of living.
To me as a 29 year old, this feels like the same "progress" as that of companies with a customer service without telephone number. If you have a real problem and you need a person on the other side, they don't provide it. It's just cheapskating.
I can self-checkout, or at some supermarkets self-scan (using a handheld scanner), but I chose the human checkout operator. It's partly economic, the supermarket doesn't discount my shop if I do the checkout work myself, so I extract a modicum of their takings towards wages for a local person rather than have it go to shareholder profit. People here need jobs.
I think the self-checkout suffers from a fairly common fact: it doesn’t actually save any labour, just now the customer does the scanning instead of an employee. Of course, the argument goes that you can have more of them as opposed to staffed tills but that doesn’t actually seem to be working out as per TFA since they’re expensive to install.
One thing that I have seen actually adding value is where there’s a scanner that you carry around and scan items as you pick them up (some shops can let you do this with your phone's camera). This does save time and you simply pay at the end and don’t need to scan and bag everything since you’ve been doing that on the go.
Of course, these days I use the delivery service and get groceries delivered once a week so that’s kind of the ultimate convenience ;)
> Obviously they’d rather the company hire more workers and charge them s little extra.
It's happened the other way around - self checkout didn't exist, and when it was introduced prices didn't drop even though employment expenses are now lower. There isn't even an incentivising discount for using the self-checkout.
I've seen people have no end of problems with self-checkout systems, and would rather I have an experienced and 'expert' human dealing with the scanning and check-out part that I can also interact with.
I'm not a fan of the corp using self-checkout to increase their profits through cutting the headcount, but I always prefer shop workers to do the actual inventory and other floor tasks than sitting at the cash register.
> I agree that removing some human interactions from my life is good. I vastly prefer self-checkouts in shops.
Curious example. Personally, I hate self-checkouts machines, and consider them an example of stores abusing their "stickiness" to profit at the expense of both customers and employees, and get away with it.
First of all, like most "self service" solution, it's basically making the user/customer do the work that, before, was done by the service. Secondly, it's just plain less efficient. You need some 3-4 self-checkout machines and a dedicated person to watch them (to e.g. approve alcohol purchases), just to replace one clerk and their station, while keeping throughput more-less the same. What the stores do instead is, install 2 stations per replaced cashier, and have existing employees do the "watch duty" - which is why half the self-checkout machines end up being stuck for 5 minutes at a time, waiting for the overworked employee to finish resupplying a shelf, and walk all the way to the checkout arena to swipe their card a few times.
The queues get longer, people get more aggressive, everyone is doing unpaid work for the store. Madness.
I am not a fan of self-checkout because it always needs some sort of assistance of a shop employee because of a article that need their approval, you accidentally scanned twice and they need to remove the article, it can't detect the article you just scanned in the bagging area etc. It's a painful experience. Cashier is so much quicker.
And it's video recording you when you are using the self-checkout machine.
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